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I am Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I am also the editor of the academic journal The Latin Americanist.

Tuesday, September 03, 2013

It was a bit surprising to check my email yesterday and find an email from the FARC, or at least from the account of its peace delegation. It was a canned email thanking me for my recent blog post on the negotiations (which, incidentally, is not complimentary but I suppose unlike many of my other past posts did not openly condemn the FARC, or the government for that matter, as I've done both) and encouraging me to write more. I can only guess that quite a few people received similar emails. I also can only guess that the NSA is loving me right now (the first thing my wife asked me was whether we'd soon be visited by the FBI).

This is part of an overall strategy of demonstrating moderation. There is no ideological war that has raged for decades, just a difference of agreement about social justice. I don't think the FARC has done anything like it in the past, and at the very least it is an indicator of how serious they're taking the current round of negotiations. How much people buy it is an entirely different story.

Havana, 2 september 2013.

Hello Dr. Gregory Weeks,

We have read your blog http://weeksnotice.blogspot.com/, which has pretty much (and objective) information about Colombia and the peace process. Thank you! We think the peace process and the struggle for social justice in Colombia needs international support badly. We hope that you will continue to support us in the future, not only during the present peace talks in Havana but also in the years to come when hopefully a peace agreement will be ratified and implemented in Colombia. We can offer you the following aids in helping to support us:

· RSS feeds that you can find at http://www.farc-epeace.org/index.php/rss.html. You could use one of those feeds to embed and publish on a special section of your website by use of a widget. And of course you can include our general RSS feed in your personal RSS-reader (i.e. Inoreader) to stay tuned about the peace process.

· We're on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as well. Feel free to use those feeds, embeddings and links too on your website. If you do, we'll be more than happy if you link to our website on that spot as well.

· You can republish any article of which we have the copyright and that is published on our website http://www.farc-epeace.org. But please let us know in advance and mention and link to our website in that specific republished article as well.